SEATTLE — In the days after Chanel Reynolds’s husband was hit while riding his bicycle , she was not yet consumed by grief. There were no dogged middle-of-the-night Web searches for faraway cures for his crushed upper spine or tearful bedside vigils with their 5-year-old son.

Instead, the buzz in her brain came from a growing list of financial tasks that grown-ups are supposed to have finished by middle age. And she and her husband, Jose Hernando, had not finished them.